Basic Training
by Ster J
Summary: Ch. 1: Spock is bored with the menu at Starfleet Academy—until he discovers "meetloaf." Ch. 2: Greater love hath no Peep than to lay down its life for its own.
1. If it's Saturday, it must be meatloaf

Title: Basic Training

Author: Ster Julie

Codes: TOS; Spock; Starfleet Academy; Peep

Rating: PG

Part one of two

Summary: Spock is bored, bored, _bored_ with the menu at Starfleet Academy—until he discovers "meetloaf."

_For Stephen_

~ooOoo~

_"If It's Meatloaf, It Must Be Saturday"_

Spock stood in the Starfleet Academy Mess Hall chow line and sighed mentally. Basic training was nearly over, and he was looking forward to finally getting off campus and looking for some decent Vulcan cuisine, ANY Vulcan cuisine. For the past 7.45 weeks he had been limited to eating refined grains, enough lettuce to choke the rabbit in Alice in Wonderland, and legume products of varying sizes, shapes and dubious tastes.

Spock was certain that the item labeled "tofu" was once used to adhere decorative paper to walls. He understood the concept that the soybean product (He couldn't, just _couldn't_ call it food!) had no taste to speak of when eaten alone. He knew that it needed to be in a symbiotic relationship of sorts with the sauces, broths and other vegetables put with it to be palatable.

_No. Impossible,_ Spock corrected himself. _There is no way that that gelatinous goo could _ever_ be considered palatable!_

It wasn't that Spock hadn't tried. He had had soy "milk," soy "cheese," soy ice "cream," soy crackers, soups with soy minced into small cubes, thick "cream" soups made with puréed vegetables, silken tofu and broth, slabs of firm tofu marinated and grilled like a piece of animal flesh, tofu soaked in sweet barbeque sauce, in savory teriyaki sauce, in hot piri piri sauce, and in salty soy sauce, all to no avail. If he ate any more tofu, Spock would, would… Well, he didn't know_ what_ he would do, but he was certain of one thing.

He would not enjoy it.

The height of illogic was the meatless entrees made to look like the animals he was trying to avoid eating. Case in point was the item before Spock. The creamy white and fluorescent pink strips of soy protein were supposedly designed to resemble smoked bacon. Spock found the aroma positively nauseating and the taste equally as bad. If he hadn't already lost several kilos during Basic Training, he wouldn't mind fasting for this meal, but the Academy had this notion that cadets of a certain age, height and gender should weigh a specific amount of weight, no matter their planet of origin. How the administrators had arrived at the seemingly arbitrary number was beyond any logic that Spock knew. The Academy doctors said that Spock needed to put "meat" on his bones if he hoped to make it through the program. The Vulcan was horrified by that statement until he translated the idioms to mean that he needed to build up more muscle tissue. Why, he did not know. Spock's wiry frame was ideal for getting around on a planet with twice normal gravity than Earth. Spock was certain that a performance-based scale of strength, flexibility and endurance would be immensely more logical, but he was naught but a lowly plebe, as the upperclassmen were only too happy to remind him.

Spock moved down the line and chose the hot entrée labeled "Vegan Chili." He had been to Vega with his parents. None of the races on Vega ate anything remotely similar to the lumpy goo being ladled into a bowl for him.

"Psst!" Spock heard from behind the counter. "Hey, Vulcan!"

Spock looked up and caught sight of a wild-haired food service worker pressing a small, paper-wrapped package onto his tray.

"Lynne?" he questioned. "What is this?"

Lynne looked around, afraid to be caught giving outside food to a newbie, but she felt sorry for the poor guy.

"It's 'meetloaf,'" she whispered.

"I do not consume animal flesh," Spock reminded as he pushed the package back to Lynne.

"Not 'meatloaf" as in ground meat," she corrected. "It's made of lentils, from my mom's own recipe. It may look like meatloaf, but believe me. It's Vegan."

Spock brought the package halfway to his nose and gave a careful sniff.

It smelled like food, _real_ food. Better yet, it smelled like _home._

Spock surreptitiously unwrapped the package and placed the slice of "meetloaf" on his plate. Lynne added peas and mashed cauliflower to his tray, while he added an apple. At first glance Spock's meal looked no different than the meals of the other cadets. Spock seated himself with the others in his company and took a small taste.

Lynne watched with pleasure as a hint of bliss crossed Spock's features. He raised his eyes and his mug of tea to Lynne in a grateful salute, silently pleading with her to bring more. Lynne winked in response as if to say, "Message received."

Suddenly, a strong hand clasped Spock shoulder.

"Glad to see that you're finally eating something I can recognize, Spock," the drill sergeant commented. He stepped back and addressed the whole company.

"Chow down, people," he ordered sharply to the group. "When you are in battle, there is no time to dine. After you police your area, we will have a demonstration of micro-miniature weaponry."

A mental "Aw!" went up from the crowd.

"You plebes got a problem with that?"

"But it's Saturday, Sir," one youngster moaned.

"How can you be so sure it's Saturday?" the DI barked.

The whole company jumped to attention and barked back, "Sir! If it's meatloaf, it must be Saturday! Sir!"

The DI shifted his eyes back and forth over his group. They were full of promise, young and malleable, far from the shapeless lumps of clay that had arrived less than eight weeks ago.

He only hoped they were able to tolerate the upcoming demonstration on full stomachs.

TBC


	2. Like never before

Title: Basic Training

Author: Ster Julie

Codes: TOS; Spock; Starfleet Academy; Peep

Rating: G

Part two of two

Summary: Greater love hath no Peep than to lay down its life for its own.

A/N: There are bits of realism in this story. I have one of those acrylic blocks with the Earth inside as described below, AND my sister's puppy DID eat her hearing aid.

_For Stephen—Here come the Peeps!_

~ooOoo~

_"Like never before"_

The group was hard-pressed to keep from snickering as they entered the classroom and saw platefuls of multi-hued Peeps on the instructor's table. The drill sergeant silenced them all with The Look.

"Anyone not puking his, hers, or its guts out at the end of this demo gets to eat any remaining Peeps," he stated. "Feast your eyes on the screen."

The company's gaze was riveted on the screen the DI indicated. The grainy image showed a non-descript crowd in a bustling non-descript city. Suddenly one, then another, then others fell as if poleaxed. Others rushed to their aid briefly before running off in fear as liquid began pouring out of the victims' orifices.

"Autopsies showed that the victims died immediately," the DI continued.

"What caused their deaths?" Spock asked.

"Their brains were liquefied," the instructor replied. A few of the new cadets began to gag. "There were no burns, no breaks in the skin, not even a hole in their skulls," the DI listed. "Any idea as to what would cause the brain to be so affected, but not the rest of the head?"

"Pinpoint lasers," Spock concluded.

"Continue, Cadet."

Spock jumped to his feet. "Sir! Pinpoint lasers have been used in similar ways since the twentieth century on Earth! Sir!" he replied while at attention.

"List some examples, Cadet," the DI egged on.

"Sir! Lasers have been used in medical applications to halt the spread of tumors, to seal of bleeding vessels of the eye," Spock answered. "There were other applications in manufacturing, in art, in … "

"Art?" the DI interrupted laughed. "You mean those two credit acrylic geegaws with the Golden Gate Bridge stuck inside? That's not art, Cadet."

"Sir! As you say, Sir!" Spock replied, noting that it would not be wise or prudent to reveal that _his_ acrylic "geegaw" had inside it an image of the Earth sitting on a pair of large hands.

"So," the DI said to get the discussion back on subject, "This was a suspected assassination attempt on Regis V. The wave affected those with assisted hearing devices, much like the one their Planetary Governor usually wears. Luckily for him, his new puppy ate his hearing aid the night before, so he was spared.

"So, you find yourself in a similar situation. What do you do to defuse the situation, to protect the civilians, to render the unfriendlies harmless, to fulfill your mission? Use the Peeps for target practice. Find out what simple thing would have deflected those micro lasers. You have two hours." The DI popped a Peep into his mouth and left the building.

The cadets worked together to chart all that they knew about the lasers. Spock pointed out that, since no blinding flash was detected in the security footage, "lasers" was a misnomer. The beams had to be in the ultra-violet or infra-red range of the spectrum. Using the Peeps for target practice as instructed, the cadets discovered that the beams melted the Peeps from the inside out when zapped with the extremely low end of the infra-red range.

First half of the problem solved.

One of the older newbies pointed out that the natives wore elaborate hats. If those hats could be lined with a material that would block the rays, the natives would be protected, too.

But before they could find a blocking agent, the nature and source of the rays had to be determined.

One of the cadets, Cadet Martin, played a hunch.

"Check for solar flares," she suggested. Spock nodded after a moment.

"Confirmed," he reported from the computer. "There was intense solar activity occurring on Regis, producing a proton storm. Protons are high energy particles. Such protons could have passed through the upper atmosphere, which had been ionized by a soft X-ray flux by the flare, and caused the damage to these civilians."

"But why only those wearing hearing aids?" a medical track cadet asked.

"Perhaps the hearing aids somehow attracted a greater amount of waves, or amplified the waves somehow," Martin added.

Spock was surprised that this seeming leap of illogic led them closer to a solution. It seemed that Cadet Stella Martin was living up to her name. She would make a fine astrophysicist, just like Cadet Jones would make a fine sociologist. Cadet Habduramashi was very skilled at organization. In fact, each cadet in Spock's company was gifted in one way or another. They had gelled into a cohesive unit during Basic Training, sometime seeming to think as one mind, operating like the crew on a starship.

Various materials were gathered for the final part of the assignment. Hats were fashioned for the Peep from paper, glass, transparent aluminum, tin foil, foam, polymer, and other small items. A row of be-hatted Peeps were lined up firing-row style.

"Aw, not the yellow ones," one voice protested.

Each Peep received a blast through the hat. Many of the aforementioned Peeps gave their lives for science and melted. White goo seeped from beneath their little hats.

The metals and stone hats worked adequately but were deemed too impractical, since a full sized hat would be too heavy and cumbersome to wear.

One cadet grasped a square of tin foil and fashioned a helmet for the last Peep.

"Ready! Aim! Fire!" one cadet ordered.

The hat was untouched and the Peep was intact.

Exactly two hours later, the Drill Instructor returned and found heaps of slaughtered Peeps, all except for one melted almost beyond recognition.

The remaining Peep sported a conical hat made of tin foil. The sweet was presented ceremoniously to the DI with a video log of the exercise, a written report, and a recommendation to the natives of Regis V to line their hats with tin foil to combat the rays from the solar flares.

The DI was impressed. This bunch of newbies showed a lot of promise. Each and every one of them demonstrated a number of skills and talents. And even better, they knew how to utilize each other's abilities to accomplish tasks.

_Yes, the cadets of the Class of 2254 would be like never before,_ the DI mused as he knocked off the silver cap and tossed the last yellow chick into his mouth. _Like never before._

END


End file.
